MoP Beta Pet Overview (Thus Far)

There were a few beta patches this week, and with them came quite a few pet-related updates and changes. Here's just a general overview:

- Pet Battles was turned on for a short while, and then turned off (but wild pet tracking is still "on" last I checked). Here are some of the Pet Battles details, but I'm not sure if all of it is accurate since it was observed during the premature testing period. In other words, don't be surprised if things change and that information becomes outdated fairly quickly.

- Initially, Pet Battles training required level 5 but now it seems the trainer won't let you learn it until you're level 90. I'm not sure if that's how the finalized version will be, or if it's simply an extra measure to prevent players from learning the skill prematurely.

- Caging companions through the Pet Journal was enabled and fixed so that the pet cage taught the actual spell for the pet and not just the Hyacinth Macaw.


- An updated wild pet tracking system was implemented. Instead of showing all possible critters on the mini-map, there are now two different critter icons (as seen in the image above). One to indicate if a pet is capturable (the green paw print) and a mini-map icon that shows non-capturable critters that are used for leveling your companions (the brown dot).

- More tooltips were added into the Pet Journal for different abilities and sources for each pet (but not all pets have had their source location added in yet).

- Pet Achievements are showing up in the new pet achievement tab. There's one major category for general pet-related accomplishments, and three sub-categories; Collect, Battle, Level.


- The auction house has a new filter tab just for pets. To make it easier to find a certain pet, they've added companion family filters such as humanoid, flying, critter, etc.

- Pet Biscuits and the companion toys/goodies don't seem to work on wild pets (yet?). Hopefully that will change in a future beta build.

- Extra BoP pets (such as those holiday boss dropped Toxic Wastelings and such) are still useless. It's strange because I can cage a Toxic Wasteling, which removes it from my journal, but when I attempt to learn the extra BoP wasteling I have saved in my bank, I get the "already known" error. Using the caged version of the wasteling to re-add it into my journal seems to work fine, though. I still plan on holding onto the BoP companions just in case things change in the future.

- Pets seem to persist in the Pet Journal even if you delete the character that learned a specific pet (and that toon is the only one that learned it). I'm still not sure if that's intended or if that's a bug that will eventually get worked out.

If there are any specific questions or something you'd like tested on the beta, please let me know! I'm trying to think of every possible test/scenario to test for all things pet-related. I'd love for companions to be implemented nearly bug-free in the final version of MoP so everyone can just enjoy the new features and pets without any hassle or worry.

I can't test out anything tied to the achievements yet, though, since they don't seem to be functioning atm. And anything related to capturing wild pets will have to wait until Blizzard turns Pet Battles back on.

There's a list of all the companions that have been datamined from the beta over at WarcraftPets, but only the ones with binding tags on them - BoU, BoP, etc.

On top of that, I'm going to be writing up a list of capturable wild pets for my personal use since my slight OCD to organize and keep track of everything is starting to bug me. Although the 500 number in the Pet Journal might not be the number of possible pets to capture, I can assure you that there are a lot of wild pets listed. It's pretty overwhelming at first glance!